Velodyne Investment Update

WOW – this is much bigger news than I reported on yesterday. The complete story is that Ford and Baidu are joining forces with Velodyne by investing $150 million to further autonomous vehicle research and development. Velodyne has certainly come a long way from the days of building a lidar to win the DARPA contest.

This is all about reducing the cost of solid state lidar.“LiDAR continues to prove itself as the critical sensor for safe autonomous vehicle operation,” said David Hall, founder and CEO, Velodyne LiDAR. “This investment will accelerate the cost reduction and scaling of Velodyne’s industry-leading LiDAR sensors, making them widely accessible and enabling mass deployment of fully autonomous vehicles. We are determined to help improve the goal of safety for automotive vehicles as soon as possible, as well as empower the efficiency autonomous systems offer.”